Word: chen
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...Then, came the text message: "Chen Guangcheng has been sentenced to four years and three months' imprisonment." Chen is a legal activist whom I first met a year ago. A native of China's eastern Shandong province, he had come to Shanghai to publicize the plight of women who had been forced to undergo abortions or sterilizations as part of the nation's family-planning campaign. Although China has tried for more than two decades to lower its population through its "one-child policy," the coercive measures used in Shandong's Linyi region are now illegal. Chen's mission seemed...
...days later, I saw Chen again in Beijing, where he was trying to meet with State Family Planning Commission officials to tell them the situation in Linyi. He gave us contact information for women who underwent the forced procedures, so my assistant and I decided to travel that very evening to Shandong to meet several victims, including one woman who had to abort her baby two days before her due date. (Night reporting is a popular tactic for foreign journalists in China. The dark affords us anonymity in places we are not supposed to visit under stringent Chinese Foreign Ministry...
...wrapped up our meeting in Beijing that day last September, Chen had one last request: Would it be possible to see what I looked like? I said sure. Chen lifted his hands and felt my face. My nose, he commented, wasn't too big for a foreigner's. Chen had been blinded by a fever as a small child. His hands, as well as an unusually supportive family that read him law books out loud, were what allowed him to see the world...
...While Xu was in detention - he'd been taken into police custody the night before after men who had been following him around in a car accused him of stealing a wallet, according to his friend and fellow lawyer, Teng Biao - Chen sat through a trial on charges that could earn him five years in jail. According to another of his lawyers, who had spoken to Chen's brother, Chen vomited during the trial. It was, wrote longtime China law scholar Jerome Cohen, in an e-mail sent to reporters, an "understandable and appropriate" response to "the nauseating nature...
...Among Beijing's greatest achievements in recent years has been its ability to convince the Chinese people and the rest of the world, that life in China is getting better each day. But as Chen sat through his trial, I - and some of China's brightest optimists - had trouble feeling convinced...